[kfhga]

Open source developers have spent far more time to develop the truly free stack that Meta uses to power its business in the first place.

I am grateful to these developers. I am not grateful for a half open release and the redefinition of established terms. Which, judging by the downvoting in this thread, are now spread with fire and sword.

[phyrex]

A lot of these open source developers that made and improved this "truly free stack" are employed by meta and other big techs

[alsjas]

The stack was very usable in 2010. At that time, some gcc and kernel developers were employed by SuSE and RedHat. It was not common to be employed by a large corporation to work on open source.

Projects like Python were completely usable then. But the corporations came, infiltrated existing projects and added often useless things. Python is not much better now than in 2010.

So you have perhaps React and PyTorch. That is a tiny bit of the huge OSS stack. Does Meta pay for ncurses? for xterm? Of course not, it only supports flashy projects that are highly marketable and takes the rest for granted.

So no, only a tiny fraction of the really important OSS devs are employed by FAANG.

[phyrex]

Meta employs kernel developers (and MySQL developers and memcache developers and the people that created and released zstd and a lot more). Aside from all of these are also a bunch of python code developers, and you might want to recheck the performance improvements of 2010 vs 2024 python - much of it driven by FAANG developers!

[talldayo]

> Does Meta pay for ncurses? for xterm?

Should they? Both of those are client-side software that aren't even really being monetized or profited-off by Meta. You could maybe get mad at Meta's employees for not donating to the software they rely on, but in the case of ncurses and xterm they're both provided without cost. They're not even server-side software, much less a deliberate infrastructure decision.

There's an oddly extremist sect of people that seem to entirely misunderstand what GNU and Free software is. It does not exist to stop people from charging money for software. It does not exist to prevent private interests or corporations from contributing to projects. It does not exist to solicit donations from it's users. All of these are options that some GNU or FOSS projects can choose to embody, not a static rule that they must all abide by. Since Cathedral and the Bazaar was published, people have been scrutinizing different approaches to Free Software and contrasting their impacts. We don't have to champion one approach versus the other because they ultimately coexist and often end up stimulating FOSS development in the long run.

> Python is not much better now than in 2010.

C'mon, now. Next you're going to tell me about how great Perl is in 2024.

[adjhgG]

So, in this submission Meta adjacent opinions have called OSS supporters all sorts of names while being upvoted.

At least Meta is shows its true colors here. It must have hurt that the OSS position has arrived at the Economist yesterday, so everyone is circling the wagons.

[talldayo]

Nobody here really has an agenda, least of all on HN where the majority of us hate Facebook like the living devil. Everyone remembers Cambridge Analytica and the ensuing drama, but we're also up-to-date on all of FAANG's exploits. Meta is a supporter of Open Source, and arguably contributes multitudes more than Apple or Amazon does. This idea that strings-attached weights releases tank their reputation is stupid; Meta's contribution is self-evident, and only looks stupid when you hold them to nonsense standards that no company would hold up to. Really, which Fortune 500 companies are donating to xterm and ncurses anyways? Is there anyone?

Again, there are arguments you can make that have weight but this isn't one of them. Every person with connection to wireless internet is running a firmware blob on their "open source" computer, it doesn't mean they're unable to bootstrap from source. Similarly, people that design Open Source infrastructure around Meta's binary weights aren't threatening their business at all. An "open" release of Llama wouldn't help those end-users, isn't even guaranteed to build Llama, and is too large to effectively fork or derive from. There's a good reason engineers aren't paying attention to the dramatic and insubstantial exposes that get written in finance rags.